A cross-national examination of adolescents’ televised, printed, social, and sexually explicit media usage

The current cross-sectional study among Austrian, Belgian, Spanish, and South Korean adolescents (n = 1,983; Mage = 14.41, 50.3% boys) examined adolescents’ daily usage of TV, social media, magazines, and pornographic media, and explored potential differences according to gender, age, and country. First, social media consumption was more popular than TV viewing. Second, girls used social media in general and Instagram in particular more frequently than boys. Gender differences also emerged in genres that explicitly target a male vs. a female audience (i.e., pornographic media and women’s magazines). Third, age differences in media selection habits corresponded to developmental differences in social, sexual and cognitive needs with older adolescents using social media, pornographic media, and U.S. produced TV programs more frequently. Lastly, national differences occurred for all examined media genres except for pornography use, and interacted with gender and age differences.status: publishe